When tradition doesn't seem outdated, but yesterday

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People sometimes criticise the fact that the Pope still acts like a court. On the one hand, this applies to the administration, where proximity to and distance from the Holy Father determine much. But it also concerns the style: clergymen in late antique gowns, Swiss Guards in their Renaissance uniforms and chamberlains who seem to have sprung from the 19th century. It all adds up to a whole that seems somewhat out of date. You are taken into rituals and gestures that are steeped in a long tradition. It is precisely because this cannot be explained rationally that it works. Every Wednesday, the well-rehearsed ceremony of the general audience in St Peter's Square succeeds in uniting the many faithful, pilgrims and tourists who have flocked here with and through the Pope to form a joyful and prayerful community, and that is no small feat.

But things don't go quite so smoothly. When the 215 or so abbots and priors of the Benedictine order were invited to the general audience together with the leading representatives of the Benedictine nuns, a small delegation was to be allowed to sit in the first tier, where normally only bishops sit. The outgoing abbot primate and his just-elected successor (the author of this opinion piece), that was clear. But who else? An abbess, the representative of the approximately 11,000 Benedictine nuns. "La suora non può stare con i vescovi!" announced a papal chamberlain succinctly. The sister could not sit with the bishops. The abbot of Montecassino, on the other hand, was authorised. Dom Luca Fallica is an honourable and esteemed man and, after all, the successor to Saint Benedict. He stands for a great tradition, but also for a very small convent of less than a dozen monks. The abbess, who represents nuns all over the world, in hundreds of contemplative monasteries as well as in social hotspots on all continents, had to remain in the fold.

We are not accusing the dashing papal chamberlain, who had no room for "the sister", of ill will. But he was trapped in thought patterns that were outdated. The courtly no longer seems timeless, but yesterday.